Dr Swati Mohan, the Indian-born NASA engineer, whose historic words, “touchdown confirmed”, announced to the world the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021

Chennai-based Agnikul Cosmos to test-fire Agnibaan rocket with 3D printed engine, aiming for suborbital flight trajectory control

Shakti and Shiva are comprised of stars with similar chemical compositions, formed 12-13 billion years ago, and each structure has a mass about 10 million times greater than our sun

Many countries are watching Russia build a 1,200 MW fast breeder as a possible template for themselves

Gopi Thotakura was selected as one of the six crew members for the mission

“Vaccines are the vital pillar of global health, and the IVMA mission is to ensure that every individual, regardless of where they live, has access to life-saving immuniszations” - Krishna Ella, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman of Bharat Biotech

Pneubevax14   14 was found to be safe and induced robust and functional serotype specific immune responses to all 14 serotypes

These are among the rules brought out today by India’s space activities regulator, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorizsation Center (IN-SPACe). These rules are to govern private sector activities in ‘space’

‘The space programme is always a work-in-progress’

Low intake of essential nutrients can disrupt metabolism and increase the risk of insulin resistance

Obesity has “exploded” around the world, and it’s not because people are lazy or weak-willed - Johann Hari, Author

The platform supports different types of biomolecules, including monoclonal antibodies, biosimilars, bispecifics, antibody-drug conjugates, and other recombinant proteins

“In addition to patient care, MSK has been running successful  educational programmes” - Dr Mrinal Gounder, Sarcoma oncologist, and Early drug development specialist at MSK

A team at IASST Guwahati has identified 4 different Ionic Liquids that can be effective in extracting silk proteins from raw fibres 

The technology has received a patent from the government

“The Panel’s decision today paves the way for the critically important next stages in our work — the nomination and selection of authors who will actually write these two reports”

Potential of zinc oxide nanoparticles to combat diabetic nephropathy uncovered

‘Visual data suggests wind speeds in key regions of India are gradually declining, which could have significant implications for the wind energy sector’

Nifty futures posted a marginal gain of 0.2 per cent and Bank Nifty futures appreciated 1.5 per cent over the past week

On November 5, the stock price and all derivatives contracts on Coal India will be adjusted for dividend appropriately

We expect the stock to move in a narrow range with downward bias

Here is what the charts say about the shares of Natco Pharma, The Ramco Cements and Tata Power

Many private banks have been hit by the turbulent MFI segment. Read on to know what has caused this distress and how investors should play this space safely

Yet another story of how unrestricted F&O trading ruined a trader’s finances

When one looks at the valuation at which L&T is making this investment, the numbers get a bit head-scratching

Participants need to wait for a confirmatory move

Derivatives traders can either go short on futures contract or buy a put option, depending on the risk appetite

We zoom in on the prospects of TVS Holdings, as also the prospects of three other stocks — Gujarat State Fertilizers & Chemicals (GSFC), Ideaforge Technology and Niyogin Fintech

Here is what the charts say about IGL, JSW Energy and Max Financial Services

Mahindra & Mahindra share price can rise to ₹3,200

Let’s talk about money!

Let’s talk about how hard it is to pay small amounts online to people whose work you like and who could really use a bit of income. Let’s talk about how Coil aims to change that.

Taking a subscription to a website is moderately easy, but the person you want to pay must have enabled them. Besides, do you want to purchase a full subscription in order to read one or two articles per month?

Sending a one-time donation is pretty easy as well, but, again, the site owner must have enabled them. And even then it just gives them ad-hoc amounts that they cannot depend on.

Then there’s Patreon and Kickstarter and similar systems, but Patreon is essentially a subscription service while Kickstarter is essentially a one-time donation service, except that both keep part of the money you donate.

And then there’s ads ... Do we want small content creators to remain dependent on ads and thus support the entire ad ecosystem? I, personally, would like to get rid of them.

The problem today is that all non-ad-based systems require you to make conscious decisions to support someone — and even if you’re serious about supporting them you may forget to send in a monthly donation or to renew your subscription. It sort-of works, but the user experience can be improved rather dramatically.

That’s where Coil and the Web Monetization Standard come in.

Web Monetization

The idea behind Coil is that you pay for what you consume easily and automatically. It’s not a subscription - you only pay for what you consume. It’s not a one-time donation, either - you always pay when you consume.

Payments occur automatically when you visit a website that is also subscribed to Coil, and the amount you pay to a single site owner depends on the time you spend on the site. Coil does not retain any of your money, either — everything goes to the people you support.

In this series of four articles we’ll take a closer look at the architecture of the current Coil implementation, how to work with it right now, the proposed standard, and what’s going to happen in the future.

Overview

So how does Coil work right now?

Both the payer and the payee need a Coil account to send and receive money. The payee has to add a <meta> tag with a Coil payment pointer to all pages they want to monetize. The payer has to install the Coil extension in their browsers. You can see this extension as a polyfill. In the future web monetization will, I hope, be supported natively in all browsers.

Once that’s done the process works pretty much automatically. The extension searches for the <meta> tag on any site the user visits. If it finds one it starts a payment stream from payer to payee that continues for as long as the payer stays on the site.

The payee can use the JavaScript API to interact with the monetization stream. For instance, they can show extra content to paying users, or keep track of how much a user paid so far. Unfortunately these functionalities require JavaScript, and the hiding of content is fairly easy to work around. Thus it is not yet suited for serious business purposes, especially in web development circles.

This is one example of how the current system is still a bit rough around the edges. You’ll find more examples in the subsequent articles. Until the time browsers support the standard natively and you can determine your visitors’ monetization status server-side these rough bits will continue to exist. For the moment we will have to work with the system we have.

This article series will discuss all topics we touched on in more detail.

Start now!

For too long we have accepted free content as our birthright, without considering the needs of the people who create it. This becomes even more curious for articles and documentation that are absolutely vital to our work as web developers.

Take a look at this list of currently-monetized web developer sites. Chances are you’ll find a few people whose work you used in the past. Don’t they deserve your direct support?

Free content is not a right, it’s an entitlement. The sooner we internalize this, and start paying independent voices, the better for the web.

The only alternative is that all articles and documentation that we depend on will written by employees of large companies. And employees, no matter how well-meaning, will reflect the priorities and point of view of their employer in the long run.

So start now.

In order to support them you should invest a bit of time once and US$5 per month permanently. I mean, that’s not too much to ask, is it?

Continue

I wrote this article and its sequels for Coil, and yes, I’m getting paid. Still, I believe in what they are doing, so I won’t just spread marketing drivel. Initially it was unclear to me exactly how Coil works. So I did some digging, and the remaining parts of this series give a detailed description of how Coil actually works in practice.

For now the other three articles will only be available on dev.to. I just published part 2, which gives a high-level overview of how Coil works right now. Part 3 will describe the meta tag and the JavaScript API, and in part 4 we’ll take a look at the future, which includes a formal W3C standard. Those parts will be published next week and the week after that.

Actor Prakash Raj’s innovative incubator for theatre and arts offers a comprehensive production process, stipends for actors/techs, lodging, kitchen and tech support. It also plans to promote fine arts and film in the future.

Actor Prakash Raj says fans will soon get to see him perform live on stage

 After a memorable 2022, the industry suffered a slump in the first half of this year with only Daredevil Musthafa providing a consolation

Celebrating the spirit of togetherness, artist students have curated an exhibition titled, ‘Savouring Connections: How Food Brings Us Together’ at Karl and Meherbai Khandalavala Gallery, CSMVS museum

Actor Allu Arjun invited Instagram to the sets of his forthcoming Telugu film ‘Pushpa: The Rule’, directed by Sukumar

A three-table Naga restaurant, an artsy deli in a 1940s Art Deco mansion and a new chocolate nook: here are three new cafés to check out in Mumbai

This is the third store that Gauri Khan has designed for FSP, after Mumbai and Hyderabad

Immersive museums, historic digs and a heterogeneous workforce are helping pave the way as Saudi Arabia pivots from a carbon-based economy to a culture-focused one

The Call Me By Your Name author on how travel makes him feel and why he desires solitude

Marriott hotel’s 150th location in India comes with bunk beds in family rooms, a 24×7 wellness centre, a fully equipped spa and scrumptious local delights.

Private cruises and on-call services highlight this year’s manta spotting season courtesy of The Manta Trust in the Maldives

The national park is home to 80-odd Royal Bengal tigers. Our quest to see the big cat includes sighting baby langurs, chitals and a retreating leopard

In a future where humanity has been driven underground by an apocalyptic event, a prisoner is haunted by the childhood memory of seeing a man gunned down at an airport. A group of scientists make him their time-traveling guinea pig, hoping that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the society they once knew. […]

Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image that […]

When the names of French poet Paul Éluard and German artist Max Ernst arise, one subject always follows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “marriage à trois,” as a New York Times article by Annette Grant once put it. It started in 1921, Grant writes, when the Surrealist movement’s co-founder André Breton put […]

Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading E. L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. More than a few of us also fantasized about running away to live in that vast cultural institution like the book’s young protagonists Claudia and […]